The practice of building structures such as, for example, homes from structural building blocks is well known. Examples of such structural building blocks include stone blocks, cinder blocks and Adobe blocks. Generally speaking, such structural building blocks are relatively strong, are relatively inexpensive to make and install, provide excellent thermal mass and offer a high yield rate in production and construction. Accordingly, these attributes make structural building blocks a preferred building material in many construction applications.
In fact, there are two factors that have contributed to the growing use of structural building blocks for constructing walls in buildings and homes. The first factor is that the cost of wood building materials has increased dramatically due to their decreasing availability. Wood building materials such as, for example, wood wall studs have become less available and, accordingly, more expensive. Additionally, in many instances, this decreasing availability has lead to a corresponding decrease in overall quality of such wood building materials. For example, straightness of wood wall studs has decreased as their availability has decreased. The second factor contributing to the growing use of structural building blocks is that structural building blocks generally are capable of providing better protection in severe weather than is wood building materials. For example, in a hurricane, a home having walls constructed from structural building blocks will typically offer a higher degree of protection from high wind speeds than would a wood studs.
Because of the mass and volume of typical structural building blocks, they provide for a relatively large thermal mass attributes. However, one limitation of structural building blocks is that they provide less than desirable and/or suitable insulating attributes. This limited thermal insulation often results in the need to add an insulation layer to the building block structure for applications where the interior space of a building structure is climate controlled (e.g., a house) with the expectation of maintaining a comfortable interior environment. In some cases, forming a double wall provides the insulation layer and the air space between the two walls (i.e., spaced apart walls) of the double wall serves as the insulating layer. In other cases, some form of insulating material is placed in the air space between the two walls of the double wall or on an interior or exterior face of a structural building block wall.
Two shortcoming of the practice of building double walls from structural building blocks are the difficulty in maintaining relatively uniform spacing between the two walls and maintaining structural integrity between the two walls. It is desirable for the space between a double wall to be relatively uniform and of a specified width such that aesthetic and architectural attributes (e.g., visual appearance and architectural dimensions) are maintained to a suitable degree of accuracy. Similarly, it is desirable for multiple layers of a double wall to be suitably interlocked to provide for structural rigidity. Conventional structural building blocks are limited in their ability to create uniform spaces between spaced apart walls and to uniformly connect multiple layers of the double wall. For example, it is common for double walls built from structural building blocks to be joined only at the upper-most layer via a masonry bond beam, which leaves the remainder of the two walls unsupported from lateral movement.
Therefore, a structural building blocks system and associated arrangement configured for building walls in a manner that overcomes drawbacks associated with conventional approaches for building walls using structural building blocks would be useful, advantageous and novel.